I often find myself on road trips to meetings, events, concerts or visiting relatives. I love my little economical Honda Fit. I’m filled with wonder of how I got to this place of comfortable and quick transportation.
Mom and Dad lived in the days of travel by horse and buggy. The Rosenkrans boys in Reubens embraced a new way. They would come roaring down the dirt road. My grandma would panic and screamed for her kids to get in the house. “You never know when those crazy boys will lose control of that thing they call a car and run right over ya,” she would sob. The same thing happened later when those boys bought an airplane. But how do you safely hide from something in the sky? It was pure terror.
Mom never learned to drive. I don’t know if it was the trauma of Grandma’s fear or if she didn’t trust herself. Dad drove wherever we went. He was into power. When he was looking for a new car, he would test it by driving up the 16th Street steep grade going to the Orchards. If he could get halfway up without shifting to second gear, it was OK, but if it nearly reached the top of the hill, it was a powerful engine.
Gas rationing limited travel during World War II. Dad used the car to go to work at the railroad. A neighbor worked the same shift. They traded off driving every other week, so we had enough gas to get to town once a month.
When we needed groceries, Mama and I often walked the mile to Walker’s store. It was easy to go down, but hard to trudge back up the hill with a bag of purchases. Sometimes we caught the bus to go to town or to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Elmer Lutes was our bus driver. He always greeted us by name and had a smile. He was a nice old man. I was so embarrassed when I threw up one day because I insisted on riding in the back of the bus.
I had a neighbor I called “Grandpa” who didn’t have a car. He got around with a horse and wagon. I loved going in the field to gather hay with him, but my favorite trips were taking his cream cans from his house along Grelle Avenue to Huggins Dairy along Lewiston’s Main Street. Yes, it was by horse and wagon. When I was around 9, we made our last trek. Cars honked, whizzed by, the horse startled and was hard to control. When we got back to his house, Grandpa had tears in his eyes. “Guess that’s the last trip with old Nellie,” he admitted. “Traffic’s getting too bad. Have to find another way to get the cream to town.” My dad took it for him along with our can.
Traveling by train was convenient and dependable. Mama and I took the bus to town, then caught the train to Reubens to visit her aunts and uncles. There was so much to see from those windows — except when the wind was blowing the wrong way and we were shrouded in smoke from the engine. A passenger train ran up the Clearwater River, up to Moscow and Pullman and all the way to Spokane. When I was 7 years old, we traveled by train to Portland to visit Dad’s sister. The clickety-clack rhythm was like a lullaby. In college I traveled alone by train to Green Water Lake in Canada to help build a dining hall at a youth camp. I wish we still had trains.
It wasn’t until my mid-30s that I flew for the first time. On a cold January day, I flew over the Cascade Mountains. My feet were freezing. There was a hole in the floor the size of a silver dollar. I could see the mountains below us. The stewardess was shocked when I told her she needed to put a patch over that hole. In spite of that, flying is still one of my favorite ways to travel.
The world is only hours away. It calls “Come — come and see.” Travel is easy and quick now.
Chase Hoseley is a freelance writer and retired kindergarten teacher who lives in Clarkston. She can be reached at shoseley8@gmail.com.
